When Thomas Clement Salomon became the director of Italy’s National Galleries of Ancient Art last January, he lost no time in hatching an ambitious plan: to bring Caravaggio’s “Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini” on public view.
“It was immediately a priority,” he said in an interview, even though he was aware of the challenges. “I had spoken to many people, and they all said it was impossible.”
The portrait had been in a private collection in Florence for decades, and had not been featured in any of the major Caravaggio exhibitions or been available to scholars to study.
But after months of “decisive and persistent” coaxing of the owners, whose identity has not been disclosed, the painting went on show on Friday at the Palazzo Barberini, the stately residence Barberini had built after he became Pope Urban VIII in 1623. It is one of only a few surviving Caravaggio portraits.
“This is the portrait by Caravaggio that everyone wanted to see for decades,” Salomon said.
The painting will remain on display at the Palazzo Barberini through Feb. 23. Paola Nicita, who co-curated the presentation, described the painting as an “object of desire,” that had remained beyond the reach of museums, seen only by a handful of experts. Now, the portrait would be available for further study, she said.
The painting formally entered into the catalog of Caravaggio works in 1963, when the portrait was published by Roberto Longhi, one of Italy’s foremost 20th-century art historians. That attribution has gone unchallenged, though there are still open questions about the provenance of the work, and even the identity of the sitter.
The painting is believed to depict Barberini when he was around 30 and had gotten a prized position at the Vatican. Two of Caravaggio’s early biographers wrote that Caravaggio made portraits “for Barberini” without providing further details.
“At the moment there’s no opposition in the literature over the attribution” to Caravaggio, said Tomaso Montanari, a Caravaggio expert, but added that while it was likely a portrait of Barberini, “we have to admit that it’s not certain.”
When the painting was first identified in the private collection, 60 years ago, there were no accompanying documents, but Salomon and Nicita said it had likely been sold along with other works in the Barberini collection when the estate was dispersed in the 1930s. But scholars now have an Exhibit A to work on.
“This is Year Zero to open debate in the scientific community to study the work and resolve open questions,” Nicita said.
Rossella Vodret, who has written several books on Caravaggio, saw the portrait for the first time on Friday — “the only Caravaggio I hadn’t managed to ever see,” she said — even though she had gone knocking at the door of the owners. (She’d been turned away.) “It was a bugbear for me,” she said. She was overjoyed to finally see “this wonderful work,” she said.
The portrait is displayed in a room next to the enormous salon where Pietro da Cortona created one of the masterpieces of Baroque art, a ceiling fresco extolling the greatness of Urban VIII. In March, the museum will host a major exhibition on Caravaggio with loans from museums around the world, including from the United States.
Culture ministry officials hope they can pull off an even bolder act and persuade the portrait’s owners to sell the portrait so it can stay.
The Palazzo Barberini already owns the last Caravaggio ever bought by the Italian state, a painting of Judith and Holofernes, which entered into the collection in the early 1970s.
But the culture ministry’s budget to buy artworks falls far short of what a Caravaggio might cost in today’s market, even if conditioned by the fact that under Italian law the painting would not be allowed to leave Italy. Other funds would have to be raised from crowd funding or private donations, officials said.
“Our first dream was to put it on show, and we were able to do that, and then it’s obvious that the idea to buy it is a dream,” Salomon said. “It’s a challenge, but it’s something we’ll work on, if possible.”
At the news conference, Massimo Osanna, the director of Italy’s museums, agreed “Obviously it’s a dream,” he said. “But we’ve seen that dreams can come true.”
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